Children and General Conference

If you attend all of the sessions, General Conference can be a really long weekend. It’s certainly nice to hear from out leaders, but on the other hand, if you stay for all 10 hours of church in a weekend, by the end it can be a bit hard to stay focused, especially for young children. (In that case, it’s just torture.) Some people play Conference Bingo, in which children are supposed to listen for words (faith, repentance, baptism, testimony, etc) until they get a Bingo. Some children color ties of the GA’s. What are some of the things you do to keep young children entertained enough so that you can at least listen to part of Conference without going crazy!

7 thoughts on “Children and General Conference”

The way we work it is this. Husband and son attend the Priesthood session at the chapel on Sunday Morning (daughter and I now listen to same at home – and we generally start as soon as they leave the house, so finish sooner), and then dash back for lunch. Then we all dash over to the chapel to watch the Saturday Afternoon session, after which we return home. Sometimes on a Saturday evening and Sunday evening we will stream the live Saturday Morning/Sunday Morning Sessions on the computer, but noone is forced to listen, and people will wander in and out as the fancy takes them. And generally anything we didn’t hear makes it into a family home evening lesson over the next few months anyway. Daughter and I will be attending the official women’s broadcast next Sunday evening.

We have the advantage of time on our side. In Australia we don’t “officially” get Conference until next weekend, so during the lead-up we will stream a few talks at a time as the fancy takes us on the evenings. We will go to the stake centre for Sunday morning session (though this is also starting to become a streaming thing for most of the stake too_

In my house here in Utah, we play every session on tv. We parents watch almost every talk, while our young children play nearby. Since they’re all little, having them in the same room is as close as we can get to having them watch conference.

It’s so hard. My 16 YO watched PH with his dad. Otherwise, it’s on TV, but their worlds are mostly 4 inches wide. But it’s playing on all the TVs during all sessions except yesterday afternoon when my daughter talked me into taking her shopping and out for burgers.

We watch all four general sessions at home via the internet, and I ask the kids to listen to one talk per session. Otherwise, the legos and coloring books have their attention. (No four-inch-wide screens during conference at our house or the bandwidth use causes buffering issues.)